It was a frustrating and slow morning Wednesday for thousands of Internet customers in North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee when massive service provider CenturyLink experienced network problems.

Derek Kelly, market development manager for CenturyLink, said by noon the service had been restored.

“On the morning of Nov. 14, we experienced a fiber cut due to third-party construction, which caused intermittent service outages in North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee over the course of 3 1/2 hours,” Kelly said in a statement.

Craven County officials reported their computers were “up and down” most of the morning.

Dennis Holton, Craven County’s director of information technology, said he received about 20 calls from different county departments about the service disruption.

“It’s been inconvenient,” Holton said. “We haven’t been able to get on the websites and do research and our emails have been working and not working, fluctuating. After I was able to find out what was going on, I managed to get an email out to tell everyone Eastern North Carolina had a CenturyLink network issue going on.”

The county’s Emergency Communications Center was also affected but not significantly. There were delays looking up criminal information and doing Department of Motor Vehicle checks, Holton said.

“It wasn’t a solid outage,” Holton said. “The service would work five or 10 minutes and then be out 10 or 15 minutes.”

Mark Trail, director of information and technology for the city New Bern, said the city’s Internet service was not disrupted. The city has Internet service with Suddenlink and only has CenturyLink service as a backup.

CenturyLink is the primary service for the county, Holton said.

CenturyLink is the third largest telecommunications company in the United States.

Eddie Fitzgerald can be reached at 252-635-5675 or at eddie.fitzgerald@newbernsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @staffwriter3.